A slow, dark rain falls.
Load shedding, candlelight,
And, a bad cold aided by spiked sangria
Make me nostalgic for another night in another land
When a rainy spring night could make a lotus bloom.

This is not a nostalgia that is an old woman’s disease.
Rather, the kind that rakes up the past
Only to shut it out and move forward.
My lingering set of questions
That stretch beyond the widening sky
Stare back at me rather grimly in the eye.
A part of me is not the same anymore,
And, I have learnt that all of life is an act of letting go.

Doubting is important for keeping the faith alive.
But, so many things have been lost already
That losing hardly seems like a disaster any more.
One way often leads to another way,
And it makes a little more sense now than it did before
As to why certain paths are never treaded,
And, why certain goodbyes are left unsaid.

What I wanted to say so desperately,
In my hurry, I let it go.
And, soon it was added to the pile
Of all the little big things that I let slip
In my effort to hold on to bigger little things.

As the wind rises in the trees,
A lonely cricket starts to sing.
The glow worms shine with constancy,
Without questions, without expectations.
Reluctantly, I put the self aside,
But, I also know that the river is yet to reach the ocean.